The Nowhere Man

30 Someone’s Idea of a Library

Two dogs, thirteen guards, two snipers, one doctor, and Dex.

In his room late that night, Evan considered his next move. He’d been building a mental blueprint of the facility, biding his time for the right moment to escape. Now that René had brought in more men, Evan wanted to know more. Not just about the men but about René. This inexhaustible supply of guards raised further questions. What was René really up to here? Had some of the potential escape routes been compromised?

Evan looked at the fireplace. Made up his mind. Crossing the room, he eased the sliding door open. Knocking out two of the security cameras meant he could move unseen by the balcony, fireplace, and desk.

From the balcony he gazed across at the barn. The big door was rolled back. Inside, two of the narcos practiced hand-to-hand on a wrestling mat laid down in front of the vehicles. They were skilled fighters, acquainted with martial arts. Throws and kicks and deflections. Several others rimmed the periphery, pounding the mat and shouting encouragement. This time around René had wisely hired not just gunmen but fighters familiar with the down-and-dirty.

Shivering against the cold, Evan stepped back into the bedroom but left the sliding glass door wide open. Climbing into bed, he pretended to toss and turn, landing himself just offscreen. Then he shoved a pillow under the covers at the periphery of the hidden camera’s view where his shoulder might be. A chilly current kicked up, the open slider pulling a stream of air into the room.

He waited at the edge of the bed, staring over at the ceiling vent, straining his ears.

When the halogenated ether hissed through, he rolled over and buried his face in a pillow. He felt the draft across his back, the gas moving past him, filling the balcony, dissipating in the night air. He waited until the hissing stopped and then waited twenty minutes more. Breathing grew hard, the feather pillows trapping his breath. But he managed. Finally he lifted his face.

Awake.

He moved carefully around the foot of the bed and walked lightly into the bathroom, keeping to the strip of concrete next to the sink. With his toe he snared the edge of the trash-can liner. He fluffed it open, filled it with water, carried the bulging bag back into the bedroom and over to the hearth.

He poked a hole in the bottom of the liner and used the bursting bag as a watering can, flooding the cedar logs. They popped and hissed, giving off smoke that the chute suctioned up. The fire died down to a cherry glow, the logs disintegrating into ash.

Evan retrieved his hiking boots from where he’d placed them by the footboard and used them to stamp out the remaining embers. Then he moved them from his hands to his feet, lacing them up tightly. After waiting for the flue to cool, he pushed it open.

Wide enough to fit his shoulders. Barely.

Time for a recon mission.

Sitting on the fireplace, he leaned back and slid his head and torso through the flue. It was tight, the walls crowding in, the stink of wet ash clogging his throat. He wiggled up to a standing position.

Past the vent the chimney opened up a bit. That made it easy for him to shove his way up off the floor, using his forearms and the tread of his boots to push outward against the scorched brick. He moved in lurches, a few inches at a time.

Every foot or so, he’d stop and listen. He’d pulled a similar Santa ploy once in a chimney in the Czech Republic, squirming his way between floors to eavesdrop on a conversation. But given the thick walls of the old chalet, he had no luck hearing anything aside from his own breathing.

He made slow, painful progress. Grit caked his cheeks, crammed itself beneath his nails. The glow of his bedroom vanished underfoot, leaving him in absolute darkness. After a time he saw a spill of golden light from a room above. He wormed his way up toward the next floor.

His calves cramped, his thighs burning. He was unable to wipe off the sweat tickling his brow, so he blinked hard, contorting his face. He couldn’t look up to gauge his progress because flakes of ash fell down into his eyes. But he sensed the light growing stronger, sweeping across his shoulders.

At last his hand made contact with a lip in the flue. After so many tentative climbing holds, the firm grip felt reassuring. He grabbed the lip with both hands, put the soles of his boots against the wall beneath, wedged his back against the opposite wall, and rested.

He wiped his forehead on his sleeves and then took stock.

He’d arrived at the edge of a shaft angled down to a fireplace on the fourth floor. The log holder below was stacked high with unlit cedar logs.

Before scouting the room he wanted to check what was above.

Gathering his strength, he pulled himself farther up the flue, put his boots on the lip he’d just been gripping, and strained to reach above him.

Two thick bars, coated with soot and welded into place, blocked the way up.

He stood there, balanced above the fourth floor in the guts of the building, breathing away his disappointment. There’d be no going up and out onto the roof, which would have afforded him an ideal vantage to pinpoint the locations of René’s men. But all hopes for intel gathering weren’t dashed; he could still make it down through the fireplace beneath him and into that fourth-floor room. And if there was one thing Jack had taught him, it was that there was useful information to be had everywhere.

He led with his arms, like going down a playground slide face-first. Halfway down the shaft, his grease-slicked hold failed and he tumbled into the fireplace, his shoulder smacking into the stack of cedar logs. A crooked, upside-down view told him the room was empty.

It was a study.

Careful not to upset the pyre of logs further, he eased his way out of the fireplace, emerging into the room. Using a towel slung over the stack of extra logs on the hearth, he wiped his hands and the soles of his boots.

Then he stepped tentatively onto an elaborate Pakistani rug. He checked behind him to make sure his boots left no track. His shirt and jeans remained filthy — he’d have to take care not to brush up against anything.

Brass sconces painted dim sprays of light on the walls. Dark bookshelves towered on either side of an imposing desk. An ergonomic chair sat cocked and waiting. Casting a glance over his shoulder at the closed door, Evan moved across the room. He pulled the chair out and checked the wall beneath the desk, confirming that the electrical outlets were indeed standard North American. Then he turned his focus to the file drawer. Its thick, shiny lock did not look factory-installed. There was no give when he tugged the handle.

The desk surface was spotless and bare, save a bouquet of pens and pencils sprouting from a leather cup and a pair of slender reading glasses resting on a desk mat. No letter opener.

Evan slid open the top drawer. Nothing inside but a few paper clips, a roll of Scotch tape, and a scattering of file tabs. The other drawers were empty.

The lack of personal items seemed in keeping with René’s obsessive use of his DNA privacy spray. He went to great lengths to keep his identity hidden, to leave not a trace of himself behind. I rent this life. What is mine is hidden away down a rabbit hole. A necessity with which Evan was all too familiar.

He knew he was living on borrowed time by now — if they hadn’t already figured out that he wasn’t in his room, they would at any minute. He made the choice to keep looking. The key was finding something before they showed up. Something he could use.

He quickened his search. The trash can held only a balled-up junk-mail envelope. He uncrumpled it and checked the address label. It had been mailed to the Chalet Savoir Faire in Maine. Maine. Another piece of disinformation? He doubted it; no one would expect him to be snooping through trash cans on the fourth floor. He wadded up the envelope again and dropped it back into the bin.

As he rose, his face came level with the spectacles folded on the blotter. Something on one of the rectangular lenses caught his eye. He tilted his face to peer at it. A fingerprint-size smudge marked the glass.

Evan worked swiftly. After positioning the readers faceup on the mat, he snapped a pencil in half, then bent a paper clip open and used the tip to scrape the lead, letting graphite dust fall onto the lens. Once the dust coated the lens, he blew it gently off. Graphite particles held only where the oils of René’s finger had touched the glass, forming two-thirds of a fingerprint.

Grabbing Scotch tape, Evan stripped a three-inch piece off the roll and pressed one end of the sticky side carefully over the print. The graphite dust clung to the tape, the fingerprint lifting away from the lens. Evan folded the tape over itself, sticky side to sticky side, sealing in the fingerprint to preserve it. Then he stripped off another short length of tape and adhered the fossilized print to the inside of his arm above the elbow, protected from friction and hidden from view.

Next he lifted the top drawer, pulling it off the tracks and setting it on the blotter. He felt in the space where the drawer had been in case René had taped the key on the underside of the wood. No luck. He tried the same with the drawers to the side. Nothing.

Stepping back, he assessed the dusty bookshelves. They were filled with venerable hardbacks stripped of their covers, the spines forming fashion-statement stripes of faded gray and olive green. It seemed more like someone’s idea of a library than an actual library.

Evan’s attention caught on a gap in the dust on the second shelf, a thin slot where one of the books had recently been removed. He walked over and plucked the book from the shelf, smiling at the title.

He cracked the cover of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, and a key fell out, landing softly on the carpet. It fit the file drawer.

Crouched, he tugged the drawer open.

It was crammed with files, each tab featuring a different name. He thumbed through the first one. Bank-account details. A Social Security number. The photograph paper-clipped to the back of the folder sent a prickle across the nape of his neck. It was a middle-aged man lying unconscious and naked on the bed downstairs.

The same bed Evan had slept in the past few nights.

Shaking off his discomfort, he continued to flip through the files. So many men and women had gone through René’s operation before Evan. Every mini-dossier contained financial information. Clipped to each back cover was a photograph of a different naked, drugged victim positioned on the bed. He’d figured that René had run his scheme a time or two before, but seeing the crammed rows of file tabs, Evan grasped just how routine and efficient the process was. From what he could piece together, René had extorted over $300 million from these people.

The rear file tab had not a name but a question mark.

Evan pulled it free and opened it.

A printout of the katana sword on the auction Web site. His Privatbank AG account information. A fingerprint card. And a photograph of him sprawled unconscious across the mattress in his bedroom cell, just like those who had preceded him.

He studied the picture of himself, emotions moving in him like dark currents. Then he tore the photo and the fingerprint card into tiny bits and pushed them down a heating vent beneath the desk.

Behind him he heard the door creak open.

Manny shouted, “I got him!”

Keeping his back turned, Evan rose. He gripped the broken pencil.

Footsteps pounded the hall.

“Turn around,” Manny said.

Evan did. “It’s about time,” he said.

Manny stood just inside the threshold, his less-lethal shotgun aimed not at Evan’s face but at his crotch.

“Drop the pencil.”

Evan eyed the angle of the barrel and dropped the pencil.

Nando eased through the doorway, and then the fresh recruits poured past him and spread across the room’s perimeter. Shotguns with neon stocks all around.

They waited.

Heavier footsteps announced Dex’s approach. He broke through the ring and contemplated Evan, snake eyes peering through an expressionless mask. René entered a step behind him. He took in the open file drawer, anger lurking behind that plastic grin.

“I like a challenge,” he said. “But you’re testing my patience.”

Evan said, “And you’re testing mine.”

He stepped back until he felt the desk pressing against his hamstrings. René gave a nod to the men, who closed in on Evan from three sides, leading with their shotguns. Evan looked for any break or opportunity, but there would be none tonight.

Dex strode up to him, a needle flashing in his hand. A well-placed smack spun Evan into the desk, and he felt the pinch above his shoulder blade. Warmth spread beneath his skin, his muscles jellying. As he slipped to the floor, he caught a tilted glance of Dex peering down at him, his head cocked, his expression something between hunger and curiosity.